Welcome to the new Starship

If you’re a Starship customer or regular visitor to our blog, you may have noticed something different—well, a lot of things different—today. If you’re just now visiting us for the first time, you picked the right day!

We’re very proud to unveil the new Starship. Over the past six months, we’ve spent countless hours talking to our customers, consulting with brand experts, looking at brands we love, and meeting, whiteboarding, planning, and designing all hours of the day, and across 10 timezones. The result: A brand made for the way you spend, save, invest, and live now.

What’s new with Starship?

Here are just a handful of examples of what you see in the new Starship brand:

• Our new app experience is focused on simplicity, mobility, and education—everything an independent worker needs, exactly where they need it.
• We updated our color palette by refining our use of bright colors and setting them against a dark background so that they express the energy and excitement of the brand.
• We’ve rethought our content from top to bottom, making our language simpler and our tone more approachable. We’ve also adopted more organic and playful imagery, all created exclusively for Starship by fantastic illustrators and photographers.
• We even made a subtle update to our logo to highlight our excitement and upward mobility we want for our customers.

Starship doesn’t look like any other health savings account you’ll find. That’s absolutely intentional.

“We wanted something that looked and acted like the best consumer brands out there because that’s what we wanted to use ourselves.”

Where we started

When Sean, Christoph, and I conceived of this solution for health and wealth three years ago in my living room, we were motivated to create something different. We had seen (and used) other health savings accounts (HSAs) and, from our own experiences with consumer financial brands, we knew that customers deserved something better. We didn’t want to build a product that was sold to employers to give to their employees, and as a result, made for employers before employees. We wanted something that looked and acted like the best consumer brands out there because that’s what we wanted to use ourselves. Our points of reference weren’t and aren’t other HSAs; they are the leading consumer brands like Apple, Spotify, and Nike.

We had (and have) lofty ideals, but we also had a lot to build and not much time to do it. So, we did as much as we could as soon as we could and launched, promising ourselves that we would stay true to our customer-first vision as we grew.

Much has happened since then, both with Starship and in each of our lives. We’ve taken incredible steps to rebuild our app and everything that goes into it—with all efforts focused on making it the best and most cost-effective place for you to keep money for health. We’ve obsessively focused on simplicity by adopting the best technology available and marrying it with easy, intuitive user experiences. And we long-ago moved out of my living room and into an office to hire and collaborate with more great designers, engineers, and content specialists on the next chapter of our story.

Why we chose now

Then, the novel coronavirus arrived, and it wasn’t just back to my living room but back to all of our home offices and living rooms.

We, like all of you, had our personal and professional lives upended. But after we adjusted to our new reality, we also came to realize, like all of you, that we need each other more than ever. Business wisdom might have told us that we should lay low, that we should not take any risks during a pandemic. But our gut told us that there was no better time to rethink our brand in a way that speaks to how mobile and flexible we all are, and conversely how important it is to have health and wealth products and services that you can trust and understand.

So, we got to work. We spoke to many of you to learn what you liked and what you’d like to see changed about the app. We consulted with the fantastic team at High Tide, who were instrumental in setting us on the path to the rebrand you see before you. We shared links to other fintech and health companies we like, passing designs back and forth, and finding the visual and verbal languages we felt represented us by representing you. We video-conferenced amongst ourselves for many hours, day and night.

I heard someone say recently that “people fear paying for healthcare more than they fear death itself.” We see this fear every day, especially in the middle of the pandemic. But we don’t want you to see that. Even if the rest of the industry sticks to the old script, we want you to feel excitement, and we want you to feel opportunity, at least in one small corner of health and wealth. That’s ultimately why we knew that it was the right time to change.

What we’ve created is, we hope, something that will make as deep a connection with you as it has with us. We can’t wait to hear what you think of it.

Adam Pruden is the cofounder and Chief Product Officer for Starship. Prior to Starship, he was a lead UX designer at American Express. He’s also led the user experience and design of many national and international brands and spent two years at the MIT Senseable City Lab.